Books like

Books like Paradise Lost

12 books with a reading profile close to Paradise Lost by John Milton. Deep and open-ended; a demanding read.

1

Moby-Dick

by Herman Melville

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Ishmael, a schoolmaster seeking relief from a melancholy spirit, joins the crew of the Pequod, a whaling vessel departing from Nantucket.
2

The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

by Dante Alighieri

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Dante Alighieri narrates his own passage through the three realms of the afterlife, beginning in a dark forest where the Roman poet Virgil meets him.
3

Inferno

by Dante Alighieri

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Dante Alighieri narrates his descent through nine concentric circles of hell under the guidance of the Roman poet Virgil.
4

Works [37 plays, 6 poems, sonnets]

by William Shakespeare

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

This 1730 collection organizes the complete dramatic and poetic output of William Shakespeare, encompassing comedies, histories, and tragedies alongside his lyrical sequences.
5

The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Hans Castorp, a young engineer, visits his cousin at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, intending to stay for three weeks.
6

Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Chichikov, a mysterious gentleman of middling rank and no obvious fortune, drives a britzka into a provincial Russian town and charms the local officials.
7

Faust, First Part

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Heinrich Faust, a disenchanted scholar, abandons traditional medicine, theology, and philosophy after realizing that intellectual mastery has failed to reveal the secrets of the universe.
8

Don Quixote

by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Alonso Quijano, an elderly man from La Mancha, loses his grip on reality after consuming a constant diet of chivalric tales.
9

Collected Fictions

by Jorge Luis Borges

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

This volume brings together Borges's short fiction in English, including A Universal History of Infamy, Ficciones, The Aleph, Doctor Brodie's Report and The Book of Sand.
10

Demons

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

In nineteenth-century Russia, a small provincial town becomes the staging ground for a revolutionary cell led by the manipulative Pyotr Verkhovensky.
11

The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides

by Aeschylus

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

Aeschylus's trilogy, the only complete surviving set of Greek tragedies, follows the house of Atreus after the Trojan War.
12

The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

by Sophocles

Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense

These three plays by Sophocles follow Thebes' royal family through its curse.

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